Attempting To Recover, really need suggestions

From: John Freer <john_freer yahoo com>

To: ext3-users redhat com

Subject: Attempting To Recover, really need suggestions

Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 18:39:43 -0800 (PST)

Hey all,
Had a power failure and subsequent ext3 disk corruptions. Attempting
to fix, but not working.
Its a 120 gig IDE disk, 3 partitions. /boot, /, and swap.
Basically can't boot up since the box can't get to the system files
in /usr/ or anything.
So I'm booting off of a FC2 disk 1 in recovery mode and trying to fix
the filesystem with e2fsck
The boot partition cleaned up fine.
The swap partition came back up when I did "/sbin/mkswap /dev/hda3"
and "/sbin/swapon -a"
I cannot, however, get fsck to run fully on /dev/hda2 (the main part
of the drive). I run it and it goes through the first few recovery
steps (1A, 1B, 1C), and then it comes to the problem.
It lists a bunch of inodes (like 150) and asks:
"Clone duplicate/bad blocks? (y)" I get about 6 of these messages
with varying lists of inodes.
I say yes, and fsck continues. But, after about 6 of these messages,
the cycle of "Clone duplicate/bad blocks?" repeats. I looked closely
at the listing of inodes, and the same 6 or so groupings of blocks
are (i guess) asking to be cloned?
So the program just loops, infinitely looping through the yes
answers. (2 hours now).
No difference if I go through manually and say no, don't clone the
blocks. Just loops through the same lists.
Some data:
+ I've got a gig of ram in the box, and (I think) swap space is on.
+ There may be some several 4 gig files that were corrupted.
+ By using top in another terminal, I find processor pegged at 99%
What can I do to recover this drive?
Thanks,
John.